Sunday, February 03, 2019

Spending half your waking hours look at screens

Survey: Americans Spend Nearly Half Their Waking Hours Looking At Screens


So what? The headline doesn't tell me why this is a problem.

Would one of these headlines be better?

  • Survey: Americans Spend Nearly Half Their Waking Hours Staring Into Space
  • Survey: Americans Spend Nearly Half Their Waking Hours Looking At Paper
  • Survey: Americans Spend Nearly Half Their Waking Hours Watching TV

As far as I can tell, staring at screens has to varying degrees replaced staring into space and looking at paper to harmonize with TV-watching and here we are.

When you read the article, you realize that the concern is over screen-related eye fatigue. Fair enough. That's a legitimate issue. But that's the only issue.

Of course, the article proffers no solutions and mostly sidetracks into unrelated statistics. With big data at our fingertips, statistics are easy, and all that AI can do for us is tell us what's related to what we already know.